(FORTUNE Magazine) – So this guy is walking along the sidewalk on Third Avenue when he sees a man lying on his back in the gutter. "Are you okay?" the guy asks. "Oh, I'm fine," the man in the gutter says. "I just found this parking space, and I sent my wife to buy a car."

Sure, it's an old joke--hardly anybody in Manhattan these days would stop and talk to a person just because he was lying in the street. But it speaks to the central problem of being in New York: Simple things--things like parking, or the social contract--are not to be taken for granted.

It used to be that you could do New York the hard way or the easy way, and the difference was almost entirely a matter of money. If you were John Kluge, you could arrive by yacht and circulate by limo. If you were a regular schnook, you learned how to jaywalk and took your chances. Any given block might require an adjustment--in your gait, or in your world view. (Sign spotted recently in a downtown shop window: EARS PIERCED. WITH OR WITHOUT PAIN.)

Now there's another possibility: a whole range of activities and spectacles, photographed in these pages, that let you experience New York, the Theme Park. If, for instance, you want to take in the sights of lower Manhattan, you can (a) go stroll around; (b) go to the top of the World Trade Center and look out the windows; (c) go to the top of the World Trade Center and look at a terrific scale model of the city; or (d) have yourself tethered to the back of a speedboat by a couple of hundred feet of rope and parasail, high in the air, past the canyons of Wall Street. If you want to visit the Apollo Theatre, but all you know of Harlem is what you see on scary television shows, you can take a ride on a double-decker bus, 15 feet off the ground. If you want to take in Times Square, you don't have to worry about it anymore: It has become so copacetic that even the police outpost has a jolly marquee, with little lights that flash NYPD. If you don't feel like moving at all, you can put on 3-D glasses and take a Sony Imax 3-D virtual tour of New York.

Why, you may ask, would a person come all the way to New York and pay money to see a 3-D Brooklyn Bridge on film, instead of going to look at the Brooklyn Bridge? For one thing, the movie's pretty cool. And for another, it means that you don't have to risk parking in a spot reserved for some mobster doing business at the Fulton Fish Market down the street.

Still, there are those who worry about the encroachment of the ersatz into popular culture. As the French postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard argues in his seminal work, Simulacra and Simulation,...well...on second thought, to hell with Baudrillard. A social critic with an equally formidable-sounding name, Witold Rybczynski, put it rather well recently when he wrote, in a slightly different context: "climbing a stair, watching someone climb a stair, or reading about someone climbing stairs are certainly different--but all are experiences. And what is wrong with correcting defects? Are accessibility and user-friendliness bad?"

Yes, the theme restaurants on 57th Street grow tiresome, but even a theme restaurant, if it sticks around long enough, can become an institution. (Donald Trump was practically chased by a mob eight years ago when he announced his plan to throw Trader Vic's out of the Plaza hotel on the grounds that it had "become tacky.")

And whatever you think of the commercial transformation of Times Square, shed not a tear for Damon Runyon. Runyon wrote Broadway stories to treasure--and he also helped dream up the sport of roller derby, for a friend who had a roller rink and wanted a spectacle to draw the suckers in. Would he really be displeased?

Even if you are a fan of sleaze, some of the effects of the emergent New York Theme Park are inarguably beneficial. Anything that helps reverse the decline of Manhattan's riverfront, one of the great urban embarrassments, is a welcome change--even if it means golf in a giant cage. (And the parasailing thing is just plain great.)

There is a larger question here: If New York is a theme park, what is the theme? The city means many things to many people, but when you strip away all the cultural and economic differences that divide its inhabitants, there is a feeling almost all of them share, and it is essentially this: "If one more taxi blocks my way at a busy intersection, I swear I am going to walk across its goddamn hood."

Which is why, for my money, the best of the new rides the city has to offer is the double-decker bus tour. For just a few dollars you can ride around at an altitude where no one but children and drunks will make eye contact with you. And when your bus tries to make the turn at the corner of Wall and Broad, and there is a locksmith's truck parked halfway up on the sidewalk blocking the way, and an angry fire truck coming up behind you, and a crowd of stockbrokers trying to squeeze by--then, if only for a brief moment, you, too, can be part of the problem.